This month, we have 2 Bubble updates to share with you. Let's get into it!

Bubble releases GDPR compliance guide V2

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been around for over 5 years now. If your website processes/stores any personal data from users within the EU/EEA, you’ve likely had to make sure that you're complying with GDPR.

While Bubble released its first iteration of its GDPR compliance guide in November 2020, it has recently updated it to bring it up to speed with the latest changes to the system.

Being GDPR compliant matters if your website meets at least one of the following criteria:

• there's personal data involved, meaning data that identifies a natural person (a data subject) or could be used to identify a natural person (so not when it’s purely anonymised data that couldn’t be traced back to a specific person)

• the personal data relates to a natural person located in the EU/EEA

• there’s a commercial use of data (so not when it’s purely personal use)

Please do note that I’m a developer, not a lawyer, so we strongly advise consulting with one about your own GDPR compliance.

Not complying with GDPR will net you a fine of up to €20 million or 4% of your revenue, whichever is greater, depending on the severity of your violation.

Here are some actions you should take to stay safe.

1. Make sure that your various legal documents (Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policies, etc.) are accurate to how you handle and process your data.

2. Make sure your database has airtight privacy rules in place. Data should only be exposed to people under the correct conditions. For instance, you shouldn’t have a standard user’s email address be “publicly visible” in any case, usually it should be restricted to just themselves and maybe any Admins of the system for moderation purposes.

3. Give users a way to request complete deletion of all data pertinent to them. This is any and all data which could identify them as an individual, such as accounts, bookings, posts, etc.

Bubble appears to be working on native mobile app support

We're sure most of you are familiar with the process of “wrapping” Bubble apps into native applications for use on mobile devices. With the world being ever more “on the go”, not providing your application to the mobile market is missing out on a significant demographic. Even more so with apps, as it allows you to tap into native functionality, such as the built-in “social sharing” of phones.

It’s usually quite a tedious process and requires a third party service, such as BDK, to facilitate the actual “wrapping” of the app itself, often bringing significant costs to the project and some degree of inflexibility. For instance, currently, if you want to permanently change the initial page of your app, your app icon or your “permission request” strings, you’d need to pay the Third-party a fee to process a “re-wrap”. This adds yet more cost to your project and you’ll also add the time delay of waiting for said third-party to complete the operation.

There’s not much insight into exactly how this will work as of yet, but it appears that several influential Bubblers have been reached out to with a request for feedback and input, so there may be big things on the horizon.

If Bubble were to add functionality like this directly to their platform, while it’ll likely be locked behind higher subscriptions like the competition, it will likely simplify the process of wrapping native app significantly, and might even offer greater levels of control over your application as the wrapper and application will effectively be in “the same place”.

Bubble’s new plugin API v4

Some of you may have already received email notifications from Bubble about this, but they’ve recently released their new “Plugin API v4” and are requiring all plugin owners who use any server-side actions to upgrade to this version before 4th Jan 2024.

This change is due to Bubble effectively upgrading their framework from Node 14 to Node 18 because AWS Lambda is dropping support for the old version. If you don’t update your plugin by 1st Nov 2023, your plugin will be marked as “deprecated” until you upgrade.

Due to this change in framework, you may find yourself needing to make substantial changes to your server-side code in order to get it working again, but luckily, Bubble have provided a guide to updating your plugins to help make the process a little easier.